Sketch to Still

From Sketch to Still: The Lush Costumes and Art-Deco Set Design of The Artist

From Sketch to Still: The Lush Costumes and Art-Deco Set Design of The Artist

Costume designer Mark Bridges dressed the principals in high contrast when they were “at the top of their game.” Here, silent-film star George Valentin is in a coat and tails. Unknown Peppy wears gray. To achieve the correct shade of gray, Bridges photographed fabric samples in black and white. (In reality, the dress is coral.)

Photo: Courtesy of the Weinstein Company.

Bridges based many of Peppy’s dresses on vintage designs. “I had to make garments for Peppy. I would find a prototype garment from the 20s that was really great, but would have about an hour’s worth of life in it,” he says.

Photo: Sketch courtesy of Mark Bridges.

Peppy’s black-and-white hat is a magnet to the viewer’s eye. Bridges says he chose to have the character wear it two days in a row, when Peppy’s photograph appears on the cover of Variety, as he imagined her character would want to be recognized.

Photo: Sketch courtesy of Mark Bridges.

Hardly a day of filming went by without fitting extras. “Beyond the principals going on-screen, there was this undercurrent of fitting and altering,” Bridges says.

Photo: Courtesy of the Weinstein Company.

Peppy’s fancy flapper dress could be yours for $230. Bridges says, “That dress is from LeLuxe Clothing. They sell it with only one layer of fringe, so we added a couple of tiered layers of fringe. Then I did a modesty piece in the front. It’s a low, plunging neckline, but there’s a sheer piece keeping it together. It was something that was done in [the 1928 silent film starring Joan Crawford] Our Dancing Daughters.”

Photo: Courtesy of the Weinstein Company.

“That’s my favorite dress of the movie,” Bridges says. “I was shopping at a fabric store here in L.A. and I found this panel of black and lamé. It was sold in a 45-inch square with that pattern as the border. I had a 1929 dress that my cutter made a pattern for, and then we worked together to figure out how to lay the borders on the hem, the sleeve, down the front, just using that one panel of fabric.

Photo: Sketch courtesy of Mark Bridges.

“Peppy is unassuming, pretty much, and this is the one time she’s going to put on the dog and be a movie star, and it backfires terribly for her,” says Bridges. “We wanted her to be kind of showing off. Then when we walked into the Cicada, where Laurence [Bennett] had the set and all of the painting and accents in that restaurant are gold and black Deco patterns, too. It was meant to be.”

Photo: Courtesy of the Weinstein Company.

Costume designer Mark Bridges dressed the principals in high contrast when they were “at the top of their game.” Here, silent-film star George Valentin is in a coat and tails. Unknown Peppy wears gray. To achieve the correct shade of gray, Bridges photographed fabric samples in black and white. (In reality, the dress is coral.)

Courtesy of the Weinstein Company.

Bridges based many of Peppy’s dresses on vintage designs. “I had to make garments for Peppy. I would find a prototype garment from the 20s that was really great, but would have about an hour’s worth of life in it,” he says.

Sketch courtesy of Mark Bridges.

Peppy’s black-and-white hat is a magnet to the viewer’s eye. Bridges says he chose to have the character wear it two days in a row, when Peppy’s photograph appears on the cover of Variety, as he imagined her character would want to be recognized.

Sketch courtesy of Mark Bridges.

Hardly a day of filming went by without fitting extras. “Beyond the principals going on-screen, there was this undercurrent of fitting and altering,” Bridges says.

Courtesy of the Weinstein Company.

“George goes from a man at the top of his game to a man fading away,” Bridges says. “One of the choices we made was that after he’s lost all his money and he’s down on his luck, the suits don’t really fit as well. They're larger. He’s a little less of the man he used to be.”

Sketch courtesy of Mark Bridges.

Peppy’s fancy flapper dress could be yours for $230. Bridges says, “That dress is from LeLuxe Clothing. They sell it with only one layer of fringe, so we added a couple of tiered layers of fringe. Then I did a modesty piece in the front. It’s a low, plunging neckline, but there’s a sheer piece keeping it together. It was something that was done in [the 1928 silent film starring Joan Crawford] Our Dancing Daughters.”

Courtesy of the Weinstein Company.

“That’s my favorite dress of the movie,” Bridges says. “I was shopping at a fabric store here in L.A. and I found this panel of black and lamé. It was sold in a 45-inch square with that pattern as the border. I had a 1929 dress that my cutter made a pattern for, and then we worked together to figure out how to lay the borders on the hem, the sleeve, down the front, just using that one panel of fabric.

Sketch courtesy of Mark Bridges.

“Peppy is unassuming, pretty much, and this is the one time she’s going to put on the dog and be a movie star, and it backfires terribly for her,” says Bridges. “We wanted her to be kind of showing off. Then when we walked into the Cicada, where Laurence [Bennett] had the set and all of the painting and accents in that restaurant are gold and black Deco patterns, too. It was meant to be.”

Courtesy of the Weinstein Company.

In a recurring series,Vanity Fairpulls back the curtain on awards season’s most visually enticing films, revealing exclusive details of the creative process of art directors, costume designers, makeup artists, cinematographers, and more. This week, production designer Laurence Bennett and costume designer Mark Bridges discuss the black-and-white magic behindThe Artist*—including where to get Peppy’s dress.*

In Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist, silent-film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) and unknown dancer Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) meet cute outside his movie premiere. He’s basking in public adoration; she’s standing in a throng of fans. But when she drops her autograph book and ducks under the velvet rope to scramble for it, she crosses the line between obscurity and fame, landing on the front page of Variety under the headline “Who’s That Girl?”

From a viewer perspective, Peppy seems destined to be a star from the moment she’s on-screen. You just can’t stop looking at her. Is it her Claudette Colbert cheekbones? Her Mary Pickford curls? Nope. It’s her black-and-white hat.

“My secret’s out! I did that on purpose,” says costume designer Mark Bridges (There Will Be Blood, Magnolia, Boogie Nights). “It’s a subtle thing. Your eye goes to her right before she bumps into George.” In another film, that attention-grabbing piece would have been a bright color (see Freida Pinto’s reliance on red in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger), but in a black-and-white world, contrast is king. Bridges used the limitations of a grayscale film to drive the story, dressing the principal characters in true black and white—rather than something with less contrast—when they’re at the peak of their success.

“Even though Peppy’s first costume is, in reality, a kind of a coral color, the way it reads in black and white is a medium-value gray,” Bridges explains. “[George] is in black-and-white tails. So he’s high contrast; she’s gray. He’s at the top of his game; she’s unknown. We see the transition between them in the scene on the stairs. He’s going down; she’s going up. He fades into the background; she is in glowing white.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly in the age of Instagram, The Artist was filmed on color stock and translated to black and white. Production designer Laurence Bennett (Crash, The Next Three Days) says the decision was made for pragmatic reasons, but also because the finer definition and richer quality evoked the era more effectively.

*Even still, there are some quirks inherent to black and white, and Bridges and Bennett had to collaborate seamlessly to avoid them. Bridges says, “I had to be mindful of the graphics separating the actor from the background, and ask, ‘What color are you doing the backdrop, or what are the walls like at the auction house?’ If the actor is in brown and the wall is brown, it looks like exploding heads,” she says. “You want to avoid that.” Most prints, he says, were out: “They looked like mush.” Textures worked. “Spangles, brocades, and lamé really photographed like a dream. They caught the light. You could almost touch those fabrics.”

At times, though, the costume designer was able to use a binary palette to his advantage. In what may be the film’s most charming antic—save Uggie playing dead—Peppy threads her arm through George’s hanging tuxedo coat to give the impression that they are dancing together. It’s astoundingly convincing, and one wonders why modern gals haven’t mastered this 1920s slumber-party trick. Bridges reveals the secret. “Bérénice had taken that jacket home to practice over the weekend, but the physics of it just weren’t going to happen. She came to me on Monday morning and said, ‘Mark, is there any way you could help me with this jacket thing?’ So we opened up the armhole underneath and put a huge, oversized gusset in there. It’s another piece of black fabric, so when she reaches in, it’s closer to where her actual shoulder is. At that time I was familiar enough with what you’d see and what you won’t see, so I knew we could get away with it. The scene went off without a hitch.”

Meanwhile, Bennett was challenged to create a world both realistic and hyper-realistic. “We had this weird dichotomy where we had the ‘real world’ and films within the film,” he says. “We decided that, to whatever extent possible, the sets that were seen in the studio or seen entirely within film would be rendered in black and white, and the ‘real world’ scenes were done in naturalistic color.” By way of example, he cites the restaurant where George and Peppy dance together for the first time. “That set was done entirely in black and white—the wood grain, the paneling in the set, is entirely faux, and it was all done in black and white and gray,” he says. “It literally photographed differently. Secondly, that’s also for the cast and crew—I think that helped them get more into the period.”

Bennett also captured the spirit of the period by using 1920s and 1930s architecture, backdrops, and sets wherever he could. For instance, the stairs on which George and Peppy meet again—when she’s at the height of her career—are seen in many 1930s movies, although “never quite in that way.” And when Peppy gets the news about George’s accident, she’s sitting on a set faithfully rendered from a popular Cedric Gibbons set that was used in a couple of films. “George’s house is an existing house in Fremont Place in Los Angeles. It’s the home of Shane Black, the screenwriter. For Peppy’s house we managed to find the house where Mary Pickford lived a couple years before she and [Douglas] Fairbanks got together.”

The overall result is a film that feels even more lush, light, funny, and tragic than the works it references—but Bennett dodges direct comparison. “Most people’s received impression of works from the 20s and 30s is so wrong, because it’s [based on] 2nd-, 3rd- and 15th-generation redubs of images shown at the wrong speed, with chatter and degradation and damage to the nitrate stock,” he says. “It really gives the wrong impression. When you see good work from the mid-20s on, the best of it has beauty and sophistication that’s unsurpassable.” Just like The Artist.